i was leaning out @vital-information - Tumblr Blog

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sheepyhollows

nobrashfestivity

Joe Brainard Pansies III 1969

laughingfits-blog

iamthelowercase

Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.

iamthelowercase

Tumblr Science FAQ, round 1

What's your hypothesis, OP?

I am not talking about that unless I have results to share. That would bias the results.

I did write them down and I did share them with a trusted contact who can prove that I wrote them down the same day I made this post. (While I did so before I made this post, I am not sure they will be able to provide proof of that, because I did so on the same day.)

OP are you interested in...?

Do you have to click through to see the post? Does the clickthrough contain the words "mature content"? Then yes.

OP are you interested if the post is about...?

I am interested in the mature content labels, not the content of the post. Is there a clickthrough that contains the words "mature content"? Then yes.

iamthelowercase

Tumblr Science FAQ, round 2

Should I reblog this for reach?

Yes, please. I felt really silly when I noticed I forgot to include that in the original post.

Is it okay if I send you my own posts?

Yes, those are perfect for what I'm looking for. I actually need to do some processing on a post to make it useful for testing my hypothesis, and this makes it easy.

Are you looking for "potentially mature content" also, or just "mature content"?

I want both, please. Anything that throws up a blocking screen that you have to click through. The distinctions between them are one of the things I am hoping to study.

Does it matter when the post was made originally?

Technically no. There's no way to respond to this without introducing some bias in the results, and I don't want that. However, I do collect some data on a post as part of making it useful to me, and that data is easier to collect if the post is recent.

What if I request content label review on a post after I send it to you?

I need to see the mature content label to be able to use the post. Because the mature content label hides the content of the post, it is very hard to use a post that no longer has a mature content label. You could send me a screenshot, but people could use that to lie to me.

Basically, it's more work for you to make it usable to me.

OP are you a transphobe? It would ruin the experiment for me if you're a transphobe.

I promise I'm not a transphobe and not doing this for transphobic reasons. You should still double-check that I'm not a transphobe for yourself, though. I am not sure that this study will have the useful effects you're hoping for; I am studying something specific, and it may not be what you hope.

dtaphanel

Tender Horns

busket

he's gonna die one day soon and it wont fix everything but it'll feel great and the whole world is gonna fucking party together

shelovesdecember

Toni Morrison, New York, NY, 1998, ph. Andrea Modica

homunculus-argument

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

squid-thoughts

I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.

scarlettohairdye

When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren't sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn't speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, "Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?" Literally translated that's, "Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?"

She very gratefully confirmed that "Money goes over there," and we paid and left.

captain-kit-adventuress

This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades' worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn't understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn't know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just...do that when we didn't know something.

Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn't know a word or couldn't remember or didn't have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she'd never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn't communicate with them in the "proper" way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn't always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don't care if you get it "right." They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can't speak for the French, though. 😉)

I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they're blanking or can't think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don't because they think it's weird and so either they don't get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I'm subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.

roach-works

it's so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say 'the doors for light to come in the wall' and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?' and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they're orange.'

genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.

official-linguistics-post

official linguistics post

bastionofbibliophiles

The linguistic term for this is circumlocution, which literally means "to talk/speak around"! In this case, talking around a gap in your memory or linguistic knowledge. It allows the conversation to continue instead of getting stuck in the gap.

Another common use of circumlocution is talking around a touchy/forbidden/'unlucky' word/term/subject, like saying "the Scottish Play" instead of "Macbeth" or "it's that time of the month" instead of "I'm menstruating".